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Sanae Hartmann
(She/her)
Treasurer
Sanae is a settler aloha ʻāina originally from Cahuilla homelands (Jurupa Valley, CA) and now living in Hilo, Hawaiʻi. As a woman of Japanese and Euro-American descent who is trained in political and social science, bioremediation, and decolonial methodologies, she works to build community capacity in remediating environmental pollution across Pae ʻĀina o Hawaiʻi.
Sanae's Background
Sanae’s commitment to environmental justice began while completing her undergraduate and graduate education at Cal Poly Humboldt (Wiyot homelands). There, she studied political systems, actors, institutions, and their impacts across scales. She built on this knowledge during her MA program centered on environment and community. During this time, her Indigenous peers and faculty mentors educated her about the incessant and enduring environmental harms caused by Euro-American dispossession of sovereign Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands. Sanae applied these lessons into her life and MA thesis project in which she partnered with the Arcata Marsh Research Institute, Levon Durr (community mycologist, mycoremediation practitioner, and owner of Fungaia Farm), and Hannah Hartmann (bioremediation and fire ecologist, soil scientist, and fellow co-founder of EarthRM and Maui Bioremediation Group (MBRG)). Together, they conducted participatory action research to assess, document, and advance the process of mycofiltration implementation at community scales. Sanae is currently a PhD candidate in the geography department at Penn State University (Susquehannock homelands). In this capacity, her forthcoming dissertation project is an EarthRM and community collaboration designed to map the moʻokūʻauhau (genealogy) of the Red Hill Crisis and thus reveal existing and expanded possibilities for past, present, and future remediation at Kapūkakī.
While attending Cal Poly Humboldt, Sanae served as an administrative lead in the university Office of the Registrar transcript department. She worked closely with the Financial Aid and Admissions Offices to make interdepartmental administrative processes move efficiently for the university community. This and internships with the Humboldt Area Foundation and Protección a la Joven de Oaxaca positioned her to work across diverse teams and departments while effectively managing sensitive information. Sanae’s academic training and research collaborations, administrative abilities, and commitment to environmental, social, and political justice came together when she helped to co-found MBRG in response to the fires that burned on Maui in August 2023. She has served as an internal logistics coordinator, meeting organizer and notetaker, bookkeeper, and grant writing collaborator for MBRG since its inception, and now serves as “Chief Finance Officer” for MBRG and Treasurer for EarthRM. Beyond these professional roles and her work as an activist-scholar, Sanae is also a chef and gardener.